You can only judge whether al Queda has been sucessful in their objectives since we declared the War on Terror by understanding the historical background of the movement, and in that context what bin-Laden's objectives actually were.

The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.

For a thoughtfull perspective of the WoT, read : Informed Comment .

Something the public would appreciate from the administration. Saddly lacking though.

Joe Lockhart, (VIA Matthew):

"Mr. McClellan seems to have lost his cool. Rather than deal with real issues with real candor, Mr. McClellan is resorting to hurling nonsensical, inaccurate and baseless charges at the Kerry campaign. Making matters worse, Mr. McClellan's own words defending the president were doctored by an unseen hand within the government to help clarify the administration's position on the questions about George Bush's veracity. We should not be surprised that this White House thinks it can change a transcript as easily as it changes its story.

"This is a classic political tactic, when you can't tell the truth or you don't know the truth, blame your opponent."

It seems that the White House was not content with a simple transcript of Scott McManiquin's daily white wash press gaggle, but had to add an askerist and an explanatory footnote, to a reporter's question, no less, not to Scott's answer.

"This was a direct order he defied, right? I mean, he did have a direct order that he defied?" *

Even more desireable, a refreshing change as well, would be for them to actually Say what they Mean. Nya, that would be too much to ask.

Well, at least while we're arguing about askerists, commas and periods, proportional fonts and superscripts, and 1971 desktop printing technology, we stopped yelling about why neither candidate went to Cambodia.

Not quite a bumper-sticker, but not bad:

"It is outrageous and shameful to make the war on terror an instrument of their politics. I defended this country when I was a young man, and they chose not to. And I will defend this country as president of the United States."

That might be THE message. Tell him what he's won, Jim.

Hat Tip: Electablog*

From: Josh

The thing about these charges that the CBS documents are forgeries is that if it's so clear that they were made on a word processing program then it shouldn't be difficult for an independent news organization to comes up with a list of experts who will say that they don't look legit.

I won't pretend to be an expert in typewriter forensices, but as the Bush Guard Service Memo Forgieries story heats up, I had to put in my own two cents.

I learned to type on my Grandmother's IBM Selectric -- a government issued one no less. The erroneous talk I've read and heard tonight was that typewriters with proportional fonts were rare, especially in government settings.

BU-SHit! The thing I hated most about those damn selectrics was that they DID have proportional spacing, indeed you could change fonts and the golf-ball "keys" had a variety of non-standard characters. Every time I made a mistake and had to type over something with white-out or erase and retype, I had to figure out just how many spaces to hit the "backspace" key. Most letters were two or three spaces, an "i" was only one while an "m" or "w" were four, capital "W" was five spaces. It drove me nuts. The first time I used a work processor (my college roomate's TRS-80 from Radio Shack) I fell in love with word-processors because they had the same nice appearance as my ageing IBM Selectric, but much more forgiving.

Also, as for them being rare in government circles, Grandma gave me her old one in '78. She was an official court reporter and personal secretary to a county judge and had a government issue typewriter at home to type up transcripts of trials. When the county upgraded her machine at the office she took her old office machine home and gave me the oldest/most-obsolete of the three for school work.

All three typewriters were proportional font IBM Selectrics issued by the government. They also had very interesting characters you don't find nowadays. I remember special keys for "one-half" and "one-forth," a "cents" [ ¢ ] key, one of these [ ‰ ] not to be confused with [ % ], this thingy: [ æ ], a [ § ] and [ ¶ ]. And honest to god I think one had that "th" and a small "st" if you hit shift-"th." You "superscripted" it by rolling the palaten down one click which was a half-space interval -- standard on the standard selectric (another endless source of agravation to me.) All done in less than two seconds without thought.

Indeed it was much easier and quicker to superscript on that thing than on the web.

OK, if you kids are done with my tin-foil hat, can I have it back please?

UPDATE: A quick look at E-Bay shows that those old font balls are still available.

Note the bottom right ball. That "Legal Courier" not only came in 10 and 12 point sizes, it had the special characters I remember.

It always is....

WHITE HOUSE CAUGHT IN COVER UP
The White House claimed they had released ALL the documents, now tonight, conveniently after 60 Minutes shows the NEW documents on TV, the White House somehow releases the very documents it said it never had? Where did the documents come from, and why didn't the White House release them BEFORE 60 Minutes exposed their existence? And finally, what else is the White House hiding?

Family friends Pulling Strings to get into the National Guard isn't the story and won't win or lose the election. More friends Pulling Strings to get you out again won't be as crucial either.

Not when the President gets caught Pulling His Own Strings by withholding key documents which show what other strings were pulled. Besides, we can look at cover-up, after cover-up, after cover-up.

Oh yes, can't you just wait to see yet another President's administration completely crippled by scandal and investigations while the world burns. Tough choice, vote for Bush and watch Washington implode or vote for Kerry and die.

Or more precisely, just how much stomach do you Bushies have for an administration crippled by scandal and investigations? This is not an idile threat -- like Cheney's warning that a Kerry Victory Will Bring Devastating Terrorist Attack (as if terrorism is under control under the current regime).

No, this is merely an educated prediction that if you are a true scandal junkie, Bush is your guy! Think about it, especially if the delicate balance in Congress is shifted ever so slightly to the Democrats. Partisan rancor rivaling Whitewater/Lewinski for its divisiveness, more serious allegations of abuse of power than ever contemplated during Watergate, with many of the same players as Iran/Contra.

The list of unanswered questions about who knew what, when, is enormous. Missing WMD's and 9/11 are tje easy ones. Lies about the real cost of medicare, the war and the tax cuts will not be what consumes us under a second Bush term. No, it will be intrigue with shocking details and players whose status as household names is not even suspected -- yet.

• We've got CIA agents outed, (Plame-Gate)
  
• classified pentagon secrets ending up in Israel, (AIPAC-Gate)
  
• a trusted source/ally/special guest of Laura Bush at the SOTUA in spite of being a convicted felon turns out to be an indicted forger and letting the Iranians know we broke their codes, (Chalabi-Gate)
  
• illegal campaign collusion between POTUS and a 527, (Swiftboat-Gate)
  
• two words, abu-Ghraib Prison, (Hate-Gate)
  
• memos from administration lawyers justifying tourture, (Gitmo-Gate)
  
• one word, Haliburton, (Cheney-Gate)
  
• the oh-so convenient announcements from Ridge and Ashcroft over terror threat (Level Orange-Gate)
  
• litigation continues on Cheney's Energy Task Force, (Cheney-Gate part-deux)
  
• Ken Lay's trial will start, be televised, and the connections between Lay and Bush as well as his pay-offs to Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to build a pipe-line will become common knowledge, (Enron-Gate)
  

My guess is that you have little stomach for this kind of thing at all, because you have no guts. I say that because I believe that those of you who agree with the thrust of the Vice President's scare tactics, and believe (quite erroneously) that you are safer with Bush in office, then the terrorists of 9/11 have already won. You are already too terrorized, too paralyzed with fear to change course, even when you acknowledgte that Bush lacks the basic skills for his job. You will vote for him even though it is obvious that he is not only incapablle of living up to his '04 campaign promises, he had no intention of doing anything about his '00 promises other than cutting taxes.

You are already terrorized into voting for Bush despite knowing he is the most divisive public figure in living memory. You don't care that when his unit was called to active duty he couldn't have been bothered or that most of his National Security Team will not be around for the next term. You simply don't care that Bush has bankrupted this country, reallocated wealth to the most wealthy from the middle class

You are so scared that you have no problem with the errosion of privacy represented by the continuation of the Patriot Act -- as long as they only snoop though the credit card records and library logs of people with names that sound like Faisal or Hakim and Fatima but leave you and yours alone.. You eagerly await the expiraiton of the Assault Weapons Ban because that means that you too can buy an Uzi for those occasions when you want to feel safe from suicide bombers when going to Wallmart .


The terrorists terrified you and you deserve the gutless wonder of a president you want. He's everything you aspire to be.

Ok, I promise never to quote Noam Chompsky again. And I proimise not to use Common Dreams as source material again either -- as long as you read this, it changes your mind about supporting Bush, and you vote Kerry into office -- I promise.

War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies: "The group around Bush are real fanatics. They're quite open.

They're not hiding it; you can't accuse them of that. They want to destroy the whole array of progressive achievements of the past century. They've already more or less gotten rid of progressive income tax. They're trying to destroy the limited medical care system. The new pharmaceutical bill is a step towards that. They're going after Social Security. They probably will go after schools. They do not want a small government, any more than Reagan did. They want a huge government, and massively intrusive. They hate free markets. But they want it to work for the rich. The Kerry people will do something not fantastically different, but less so. They have a different constituency to appeal to, and they are much more likely to protect some limited form of benefits for the general population. "

Yahoo! News - Russia prepared for pre-emptive strikes on 'terror bases' worldwide

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia is prepared to make pre-emptive strikes on "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world, the Interfax news agency cited the country's chief of staff as saying.

Can't say that I really blame them, In it's way, the school seige was worse than our 9/11. Not in causualty count, but for the fact that so many of the victims were children and because the drama played out over such a longer period of time.

In Russia, the terrorists were well prepared for a long seige and took their time to terrorize those inside and outside the school. They were methodical and tore at the psyche of every parent worldwide with the thought that, "it could happen here...". 9/11, although not to minimize it for one minute, was more akin to a quick stab at the heart, not a prolonged bloodletting.

"With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world.

I wonder how comfortable former Soviet expert Conoleeza Rice is about this development? Can you imagine how Reaganites would react to Russia engaging in pre-emptive strikes and preventative wars?

Not well to be sure. This is hauntingly similar to the Brezhnev Doctrine which gave us the Czechoslovakian and Afghanistan invasions. However, I can think of little that I would consider an overreaction to the tragic results of the school seige.

But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes," General Yuri Baluyevsky said Wednesday.

OK, that probably would be going too far. How disturbed are you that Russia's Military Chief of Staff felt he had to reassure anybody that they weren't going nuclear, yet?

Of course in the topsy-turvy world created by Gworge W. Bush and his fanatical neo-conservative minions, nothing should surprise you anymore; not in a world where paleoconservative Pat Buchanan who rails against imperial America, is accused of finding common cause with the nation's most endearing libretarian/socialist/anarchist, Noam Chomsky.

There's something very wrong in the world when the far left and far right join hands with a moderate position compared to the administration, and the Pentagon and the Kremlin are at odds with Foggy Bottom.

Maybe it's too late. Maybe America has Jumped the Shark. I do long for the time where things made sense, where I could lightly dismiss as radical the polemics of Buchanan and Chompsky; where an America and the world were united by tragedy, were in no danger of being furhter divided by a leader professing to be a "uniter, not a divider." I long for the days when I only disagreed with some of our official policies, not every single stinking decision our president makes.

And make no mistake, my vision is not clouded by constant Bush-bashing, except the times where they insist on pulling the wool over my eyes.

Read this, seriously. Just do it. You'll be glad you did.

The Blogging of the President: 2004 | 1968, The Sequel by Stirling Newberry.

The only thing I can think of in response to Mr. Newberry's profound analysis, is that what you, and I, and he are doing, blogging, may be the answer -- maybe.

HAT TIP: Hal